Like I mentioned , for me dismantling my own privilege starts inside, so I think we need to do whatever we can to first acknowledge the need to change and take some self inventory on where we each have our own advantages in life. Then I think we need to spend time learning and listening. I’ve found the books The New Jim Crow, Slavery by Another Name, and Between the World and Me to be really eye opening. From a christian perspective books like The Color of Christ, and Divided by Faith to be important as well.

One of the odd things about evangelicalism is that it often perpetuates the divides between white/black in major ways and its in its own best interest to maintain the status quo rather than get into the actual deep roots of racism within. For instance a popular concept from the church growth movement called the homogeneous unit principle on one hand justified churches to cater to one type of people and grow quickly, but on the other hand made us more divided than before. So in my opinion underneath the success of megachurches is subconscious fear of the other and isolation from racial issues. They also perpetuate things white savior mentality and the model minority fallacy.

Alright you got me going- that wasn’t really what you were asking. But learning and confronting those issues is important gospel work that those of us who come from privilege need to do.

I think once we’ve done the work internally, we can then join in the work externally.

For me that means I speak openly about my privilege when in platforms other white people can hear. I’ve found that to be really important. So I say that up front at Oak Life often. This also happens in other network/groups I’m a part of when I get the chance. As a pastor in our community it also means I need to meet people where they are at and walk with them in the process because different folks are at different places. I try to make public my sentiments about this when I can

Also, our community tries to be as decentralized as possible- so our leadership team is made up of a rotating group of women and men who are technically the boss of the church. This feels weird typing up but it might give you a picture of how we’ve tried to “dismantle” and work through some of this: Our team breakdown is 3 white males, 1 white female, 1 asian male,1 african american male, 2 african american females, 1 latino female. Two of these members are LGBT as well. This is a decent representation of our community in that the biggest demographic is white, but I wouldn’t call us a white church. Up front we try as hard as we can to reflect our diversity in our community as well. When I speak (which is probably 60% of the time) we have a lot of space for conversation and questions, I try my hardest to quote non-white male theologians, when I show pictures for Jesus or folks from the Bible I try to find non-eurocentric pics, and we regularly host gatherings for this conversation to happen in various forums. One ‘mantra’ we’ve started saying a lot about the gopsel and the kind of church we want to be is that ‘Jesus embraced the margins and disrupted the center’. So I often say that if your in the center and a part of our community, we might make you uncomfortable Conversely, if you’ve been marginalized by the church, we confess our sins and we need your forgiveness and to the best of our abilities, you are safe with us.

I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there but to summarize:
– do the heart work
– learn, listen, and study
– engage in the external work

As a pastor:
– deconstruct white supremacy in the church by openly calling it out
-allow the community to be led by a plurality of voices from various perspectives
-walk with people where they are at and trust that God will transform them.
-lead by example by joining in groups, movements, gatherings, etc that are working to heal and reconcile.
-confess my own stuff, seek forgiveness.